Pete Salzman asked about optimizing a loop in terms of execution speed, by having the loop index go from high value to low instead of vice versa. Some discussion ensued in terms of what machine instructions a compiler could take advantage of in this manner.
One point that you might consider, Pete, is that these considerations are kind of nickel-and-dime in comparison to things like memory hierarchy issue. There is much better payoff potential in writing code in such a way as to minimize cache misses, which cause major time penalties, and page faults, which cause catastrophic time penalties. There is even a book on this, I believe in the Intel Press series. Norm _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
